The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture (Bloomsbury 2015)

pop-festival

The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture (Bloomsbury 2015)
Edited by George McKay.

‘I’m going to camp out on the land …try and get my soul free’. So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on ‘Woodstock’. But Woodstock is only the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular cultural consumption for young people and older generations of enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the pleasures and politics of the carnival since the 1950s are discussed in this innovative and richly-illustrated collection.

The Pop Festival brings scholarship in cultural studies, media studies, musicology, sociology, and history together in one volume to explore the music festival as a key event in the cultural landscape – and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers. The book includes a chapter by Dr Chris Anderton (Course Leader of BA Hons Music Promotion and BA Hons Music Management at Southampton Solent University) that examines the growth of branding and sponsorship at music festivals, and how festival organisers have engaged (or not) with sponsorship activities in the UK.

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